There are changes in store this summer for the National Weather Service's Nexrad radars.

The National Weather Service oversees Nexrad, or Next Generation Radar, a network of 160 Doppler weather radars. Its official title is WSR-88D, which stands for Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988, Doppler.

Kevin Laws, the chief scientist at the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, said the upgrades for radars in Calera and East Alabama, planned during June, are the "most significant change to the radar since the dual-pol upgrades."

Laws said the most noticeable change for us watching at home will be more frequent updates.

"You will now get twice as many updates as before thanks to new scanning strategies," he said.

The more frequently used "lowest elevation cut," Laws said, would update every 2-3 minutes, where it is 5-6 minutes now.

The tradeoff to the extra information in one area is a bit of a slowdown in another: Some of the products that the radar compiles at the end of each scan, such as VIL (which is used to detect storms containing large hail), TVS (tornado vortex signature) and Storm Total Precipitation (radar estimate of accumulated rainfall) will have slightly longer update times.

Laws explained it like this: "Most of the weather we deal with is closest to the ground, so you would have the need to see the lowest elevation scan possible -- as frequently as possible. The fact that the radar has the extra scan would mean that some of the end-of-scan products will take a bit longer to be generated. You have to complete the entire scan up to the storm to be able to generate those products."